I come to bury IAmCarbonatedMilk.com, not to praise it

Sat, 03 Aug 2002 19:30:00 +0000

It's late afternoon, you're thinking about dinner, and you realize it's been a long while since you enjoyed some shellfish. Do you (a) head to the seafood section of your supermarket and ask the clerk how fresh the clams are or (b) sign on to BuyClamsOnline.com?

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you chose Curtain No. 1. Fact is, you'd have to; the Web site BuyClamsOnline.com doesn't exist -- never did, so far as I can tell -- and the domain name expired on April 12. But the very fact that BuyClamsOnline.com has expired means that someone, maybe a year ago, maybe two, registered it. Someone out there, someone living among us, chose to bet that the road to online success would be paved with mollusks.

The now-lapsed state of BuyClamsOnline.com is not unusual. Indeed, nearly half of all URLs registered will expire, a turnover rate that itself has sparked the registration of domains and development of sites focused solely on the selling of lapsed URLs. At DeletedDomains.com, you can search for free through a constantly updated pool of more than fifteen million newly available domain names. Fifteen million. Assuming annual registration fees between $15 and $30 these days, that amounts to something in the range of $225 million to $450 million ponied up by individuals and businesses for what turned out, in hindsight, to be inspirations that would remain dormant.

Salon.com > Heather Cochran

I come to bury IAmCarbonatedMilk.com, not to praise it